Jesús Zamora holds PhDs in Philosophy (1993) and Economics (2001). Professor of Philosophy of Science and Director of the master's program on Science Communication and Journalism at UNED. Prolific author.
Once upon a time, in a world very far from ours, there were a group of scientists devoted to the study of bacteria, or prokaryotes, who called themselves ‘biologists’, and a different group of researchers, who studied eukaryote organisms, and who received the name of ‘organismologists’. Organismologists were very proud of the obvious differences between […]
In our previous entry, I explicated two different concepts that in many languages are subsumed under a single term ‘life’, or equivalent, but that in ancient Greek were separated as two truly distinct things: zoé , or life in the biological sense, and bíos , or life in the biographical sense. I argued that these […]
One of the principal values of philosophical thought has traditionally been the promotion of conceptual clarity: helping us to understand as well as possible what it is we are thinking when we think what we think. In the debate over the moral aspects of the limits of life, it is therefore important to reflect on […]
If you’ve been following along with our philosophical journey, you’ll remember that we ended the last article with a pretty useful idea: the concept of “inferential prostheses.” These are tools that extend our ability to draw consequences from information, to figure things out, to know what to do. Language was the first and most fundamental […]
What makes human beings unique among animals? This ancient question has received countless answers—some modern ones we saw them in our last post—but I want to suggest that one of the most compelling and least appreciated responses comes from understanding humans as the creatures who create and inhabit what might be called inferential prostheses. These […]
One century ago, when philosophers talked about technology, they’re not usually discussing the latest app or whether artificial intelligence will take our jobs. They were asking bigger questions: What does technology do to us as human beings? How does it change the way we see the world? And perhaps most importantly, is it helping us […]
We finish this series with the most influential author of our trio (together with Bacon and Descartes) in shaping the scientific method: the Italian Galileo Galilei, who was also, not coincidentally, the most brilliant and prolific scientist of the three. He shared with Descartes the ambition of reducing the phenomena to be investigated to a […]
In my last entry we had a glimpse on the ideas of one of the three main ‘fathers’ of ‘the’ scientific method, Francis Bacon. As I told then, inverted commas are justified because there is nothing like ‘the’ scientific method, only a family of different, and at times mutually inconsistent, sets of procedures, rules and […]
Although science was not born in the seventeenth century (since the need for reliable information about the environment is intrinsic to any human society, and disciplines such as mathematics, astronomy, or biology had already flourished splendidly in Classical Antiquity), we cannot deny that around the year 1600 the history of humanity crossed a decisive threshold […]
As we saw in our last entry, we must grant Gabriel that he does not conceive of the spirit and spiritual as an “immortal soul” or any similar ghostlike entity, but rather as something grounded in human thought—more specifically, in what relates to norms, values, laws, institutions, and rules of various kinds (I Am Not […]